Saddam's Choice
It's Bush's fault that Saddam kept his inner circle in the dark.
Where did the known stocks of never agent and anthrax go?????????????????? Duelfer sure the hell doesn't know because Hussein would NOT tell them.
Saddam should be whipped, shaved and sent to France..that will teach him...
They only angle I can figure out is that he was using that doubt against possible actions of his old enemies such as Iran, who could not know for sure whether he had them or not.
The article does raise a good point. Security systems compartmentalize information so that few had a complete picture so the could not give it all away. This tendency had to get more pronounced after Saddam's son in law defected and revealed much about Iraqi WMD programs. It is also a fact that the many operators around Saddam hustled money and perks from him and did not deliver but spun stories about how well they were doing and paid off others to keep quiet.
I doubt that Saddam had a complete picture himself, although he had supposedly total access.
Nobody smart enough to become Huusein is dumb enough to lose everything over nothing. Someday those WMD's will be found and I can't wait to see the look on the faces of all the dumb Poodles.
So we are to believe these generals who may have reported this or believe that what Saddam told them was actually true or maybe he told them they "didn't have any" because they had already been frisked away to Syria. Who knows? Certainly this doesn't clear anything up. It's central premise is that Saddam told these generals the truth.
Saddam may be bad, but at least he's not Halliburton, or God forbid even worse - a Republican.
"Kerry wanted us to lose in VietNam, he wants us to lose in Iraq."
Kerry says he would preempt but Bush was wrong to do so. We all know he's a pussy and would find any way to avoid making such a decision. He would wait until we're attacked.
The President did go to war but then the intelligence that was supposed to be rock-solid. Turns out the whole world's version of "rock-solid" might not hold up. Things can change in a nine-month "rush to war".
If Saddam's generals thought they had WMD then how was Bush and the rest of the world supposed to know they didn't have them?